Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

(Israel, 1982) studied psychology at the University of Tel Aviv and then film at Jerusalem's Sam Spiegel Film School. She has written various screenplays and short stories. Her first novel, One Night, Markovitch (2012) won various (international) prizes. Her second book, Waking Lions (2014) has been translated into many languages and turned into a TV series in the US. The surgeon Etan Green accidentally kills a refugee with his car and drives on. The widow, however, manages to find and blackmail him into providing hundreds of illegals with medical help. Although it reads like a thriller, the novel is mainly about moral questions: should Green have told the truth? Does he help the refugees out of guilt and self-preservation or is he a hero? The reader is continually prodded to ask him- or herself the question: what would I have done?
(WN 2019)Archive available for: Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
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Who Wants to Live Forever?
How did they express our (near) future in words or sound? In this literary and musical performance, seven festival authors each presented a new text or poem commissioned by Winternachten, with musical contributions by Syrian-born ud player Jaber Fayad. You saw and heard Ayelet Gundar-Goshen from Israel, HemelBesem from South Africa, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi from Uganda, Arshia Sattar from India, Leni Zumas from the United States and, from The Netherlands, Auke Hulst and Aafke Romeijn. Their inspiration was the festival theme Who Wants to Live Forever? The authors performed in their mother tongue or writing language with simultaneous projection of the English and/or Dutch translations.
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Books Unlimited: Ayelet Gundar-Goshen & Gioconda Belli
Get to know international literary stars and their recent books. Expect to hear about their motivation to write, the creation of their characters and the worldwide success of their books. Writer and essayist Chris Keulemans talked with Ayelet Gundar-Goschen (Israel) about her second novel Waking Lions and with Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua) about her novel El país de las mujeres (The Land of the Women).
After her debut, One Night, Markovitch, Gundar-Goshen builds up the suspense in her second novel, Waking Lions, which is about a surgeon who must live with the consequences of a car accident. Belli made her international breakthrough with The Inhabited Woman; in 2012 she published The Land of the Women, about a South-American country that since two years is governed solely by women. -
Eternal Texts
Writers Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi and Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, and poet and translator Kawa Nemir choose literature, songs, speeches and sacred books with eternal value. They presented fragments and discussed their choices with Abdelkader Benali.
In 2018, Nansubuga Makumbi published her debut novel Kintu, a Ugandan epic in which an 18th-century curse continues to haunt decendants into the present time. Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, internationally succesful with her debut novel One Night, Markovitch, builds up tension in Waking Lions, in which a surgeon is blackmailed to give medical aid to a group of illegal immigrants. Kawa Nemir translated many poems from English to Kurdish and from Kurdish to Turkish; in 2019 his translation into Kurdish of Ulysses by James Joyce will be published